His stuttered, heart-pumping reaction was mainly the result of Mizushima suddenly putting an arm over his shoulder. What’s with her, too? She’s a completely different woman out of the workplace!
“Yuki! Let go of the poor man; you’re embarrassing him… Here, why don’t you sit down, Marko?”
“Okaaaay!” Mizushima said.
“Um, sure, uh, excuse me…,” Maou acquiesced.
Mizushima sat down beside Kisaki, and Maou took an aisle seat. As he looked at Mizushima across from him, as she was peering at the menu, he couldn’t help wondering what the hell was about to happen.
“I’ll pay for you guys tonight, so have at it! Do you drink, Maou?” she asked.
Legally, and age-wise, Maou was fully cleared to drink alcohol in Japan. But thanks to reflexes honed by the frugal lifestyle he’d “enjoyed” for so long, along with the two women staring him down right now, he just couldn’t.
“N-no, um, I gotta get up early tomorrow, so I’ll just take oolong tea.”
“Pretty sober-minded, huh? Or nervous? Or holding back?”
Maou was beginning to surmise that Mizushima had enjoyed one or two herself before visiting MgRonald.
“If we’re talking about Marko, I’d say all of the above.”
“Ms. Kisaki…”
He had to object to that, but Kisaki ignored it as she, out of nowhere, turned to Maou and bowed her head.
“I’m sorry. I lost my temper, and I made you go through all of that.”
“Oh, um, no…”
“Kiki isn’t letting herself drink during her suspension, so don’t worry about that. But how about it? You have to be hungry after work. We already ordered a bunch of stuff.”
“…Are you drinking, Ms. Mizushima?”
“Well, I’m not on suspension,” she brazenly declared as a glass of sweet-potato shochu liquor on the rocks was placed on the table. “So. The reason I dragged you in here was because I wanted you to listen to an old story of ours.”
“An old story?” a confused Maou asked.
“About Himeko Tanaka, that girl Sarue brought in.”
“Oh, Mr. Sarue actually told me a little about her. He said you’ve known each other a while?”
“Yeah, it’s been a while, all right…” Mizushima smiled as she played with the ice in her drink. “I mean, since kindergarten, essentially.”
“Huh?”
The bombshell made Maou gasp a little. This wasn’t just the realm of “acquaintances” any longer. This was a lifelong thing. And it led him to another conclusion:
“Wait… You too, Ms. Mizushima?”
“No, I first met her in grade school. We were in kindergarten together, but different classes.”
“That’s not much of a difference!”
Mizushima gave Maou a quiet laugh. “Oh, the bad blood between them’s been legendary since elementary school.”
“Oh…”
“And if you ask our mutual friends, they were even having it out with each other back in kindergarten.”
The “frenemies” tag seemed pretty well set in stone now.
“So why are you still associating with each other?”
“Not associating,” Kisaki grumped. “It’s all Yuki’s fault that I can’t separate myself from her.”
“Oh, that’s not very nice!” Mizushima gave her companion a bop on the upper arm. “But anyway, Kiki and Hime have always been so competitive—to the point of, like, why take it to that level, y’know? Plus, they were stuck in the same class for nine straight years, from first grade ’til the end of middle school. That’s another reason.”
“W-wow. That’s amazing.”
Even Maou, who’d never had the pleasure of experiencing the Japanese education system, knew that schools generally shuffled class assignments from year to year. Having a common classmate for the first nine grades of compulsory education took nearly miraculous odds.
“As far as I remember, Kiki’s always been good at art and calligraphy and stuff, so she always won a prize for that every year in school. And every time, Hime would turn red in the face. Hime’s what I guess her guidance counselor would’ve called the ‘noncreative’ type.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, she’s got absolutely zero artistic ability whatsoever. Her handwriting was terrible, and if you asked Himeko to draw a dog, a bird, and a fish, you wouldn’t be able to tell which one was which.”
“That’s…impressive…”
“Yeah, and meanwhile, the pictures I’d draw in art class would keep getting picked for showings at the local ward office.”
Kisaki seemed at least a bit proud of that—something Mizushima was quick to gleefully shoot down.
“But the thing is, Kiki could never beat her in sports.”
“Say what?!”
“Ngh…!”
It was hard to believe, given how little the two of them differed in body structure now, but judging by Kisaki’s reaction, it was the truth.
“Kiki wasn’t a total disaster in phys ed, but Hime was really good at it. Whenever there was a long-distance race or a fitness test, she’d always place in the top. And meanwhile, Kiki would cry her eyes out every time she lost a race, like ‘Ooh, next year I’ll get her!’”
“Ugh, that made me so mad! I was bigger and stronger than her, too! But I didn’t lose to her all the time, Marko! I beat her once in the second year of middle school! You know, during a practice marathon run in gym!”
“O-oh…”
That was about the best Maou could do. It was hard to imagine Kisaki crying, even as a child. Maou had no idea how to react to Kisaki expressing honest emotion over something besides daily fast-food sales.
“Yeah,” Mizushima protested, “but Hime was running a fever that day. She was sick, but she was all like ‘I don’t wanna sit out, I don’t wanna run away from a competition with Kiki!’ So she forced herself up there, and then she wound up being absent for a whole week afterward, remember that?”
“You gotta keep yourself conditioned for big races like that, all right?!”
“…”
It wasn’t the conversation that left Maou at a loss for words, it was getting a chance to see Kisaki and Mizushima as they really were, outside the workplace. Perhaps noticing this, Mizushima let out a polite cough.
“You know,” she said, “it’s not like I’ve tried to sell my soul to my job or anything. If I’m with friends, I’ll carry on like an idiot, just like anyone else. I’m afraid to lay out my emotions sometimes.”
“R-right.”
She was right, but the gap between this and Kisaki’s above-it-all attitude on the job would be enough to throw anyone.
“B-but how did you guys get so antagonistic in the first place…? I mean, from kindergarten? Really?”
“I don’t remember myself,” Kisaki replied, “but according to my parents…”
“Your parents accepted it?” Maou asked, baffled.
“…During kindergarten, there was this one male teacher all the girls liked a lot. Me and her fought over who’d invite him to play house with us, and that’s apparently how it got started.”
“Just because of that?”
She made it sound like a very wholesome kind of younger-years argument, but did things like that really trigger an age-old, never-ending clash of wills?
“Well, how did you get involved, Ms. Mizushima?”
“I was kind of like the cushion between Kiki and Hime. If Kiki was crying ’cause she lost to Hime, I’d console her. If Hime was all angry ’cause Kiki beat her, I’d help her work some of the stress out.”
Maou was about to ask why she’d take on such a difficult, thankless job, but stopped himself. It must’ve shown on his face, though.
“You know, whatever they thought about it, I was never bored around those two. And they’d cause a lot of trouble if you left them alone, but if you could point them in the right direction, that made a lot of things go better in class. I was class president a few
times, so…”
“I see…”
In a way, Mizushima was the puppet master, pulling the strings of Kisaki and Himeko. Maou was starting to sense that she wasn’t anyone to trifle with, either.
“And, you know, they always put a lot of effort into their studies, so they were near the top of the class in test scores and stuff. They always put up the names of the top twenty scorers in the final exams, and it always made me sick to my stomach, because whether it was Kiki over Hime or the other way around, they’d always fight over it.”
“That just sounds like sarcasm coming from you, Yuki,” Kisaki muttered sullenly. “I don’t think me and Himeko ever beat you in those rankings.”
“Hey,” the breezy Mizushima replied, “if I wanted to keep hanging with you guys, I needed to work for it. But whichever way it turned out, I think we were pretty good friends, you know? All three of us. Maybe not BFFs or whatever, but not like…you know, ‘hey, wanna hang in the bathroom with me,’ right? Like what you saw with a lot of girls.”
“That’s a lame joke. She was never a friend to me once. We just stayed together because you said so, Yuki.”
It made Maou realize it all over again. Mizushima: the one woman capable of bringing Kisaki and Himeko Tanaka together, despite everything. Scary.
After graduating middle school, they went on to separate high schools, which theoretically would’ve brought an end to this epic battle. But then, three years later, they all ran into each other at the same university.
“Wow,” Maou said, getting used to the atmosphere, “it’s like destiny or something.”
“Yeah, well, we all lived near each other, so… But by the time you’re college age, you’d assume that we’d be kinder and more mature with each other, right? Wrong.”
Instead, Kisaki and Tanaka, both studying business administration at Meiji University, picked up right where they’d left off, albeit on a new level.
“While we were in school, the economy was down the toilet and grads were having the worst time finding decent jobs. We all knew that, so we worked as hard as we could in all our classes…and that kind of kicked things off again.”
“Even now, I question the sanity of the professor who gave Himeko’s report on educational management theory an A. Proposing this systematic approach without keeping employee personalities or any other unexpected elements in mind. I mean, who is she kidding?”
“…Yeah. So that’s where the battle started up again.”
“I see.”
All he could do was grin. Now Kisaki and Tanaka weren’t fighting about results—they were arguing about theories and processes, too. It just threw their competition into further confusion.
“But the real clincher was that ‘Miss Meiji’ contest, wasn’t it?”
“Miss Meiji? You mean like those beauty pageants you see on TV?”
“Yeah. Our school just had a small campus festival each year, so we’re talking basically a glorified dress-up show. It’s not like winning would get you scouted for TV gigs. But anyway, they held a Miss Meiji pageant, and the friends we had in our study groups persuaded all three of us to try out.”
“Ah…”
Maou recalled the words Kisaki and Himeko had exchanged: “Well, that’s a surprise. That stupid little show has stuck around this long in your mind?” “I should say so. It was a good college memory for me—’cause unlike you, I’m not so contrarian all the time that I can’t take a compliment.”
“So, um, did Ms. Tanaka beat you, perhaps?”
“Who cares if she beat me in some stupid party game like that?!”
The reaction, all too easy to read, told Maou everything he needed to know. Regardless of its size, it was a beauty competition between the two women, and Kisaki ate Himeko’s dust. If Himeko was still bringing it up to this day, it must’ve wounded Kisaki terribly—but if Maou tried to console her about that, he’d have nothing but an infinitely expanding hell waiting for him.
“I mean, isn’t it just pathetic? Her, thinking she’s all that because she’s some C-grade beauty queen! What difference does second or third place even make if you aren’t number one, anyway?!”
Kisaki gulped down the rest of her oolong tea like it was stiff liquor and slammed the glass against the table. Presumably, Maou thought, this meant Tanaka took second place and Kisaki placed third. That had to be it.
“Oh, I was first, by the way.”
“Please, Ms. Mizushima, don’t give me more information than I need right now…”
He had anticipated this twist at the end of the tale. But getting an earful of his boss’s past life was enough to deal with in one night. He couldn’t deal with any more of their wheedling inside jokes.
“Well, anyway, now you know what Kiki and Hime were like.”
“I’d say so, yeah. More than I ever needed to.”
Once they reached their junior year, the battle encompassed both their pecking order and the validity of their pet theories, with a new and emphasized focus on their visions for future employment. Their friends used to compare them to a bride bickering with her new mother-in-law, and they were only half-joking.
“With their job hunt, Kiki was, like, super gung-ho. If you aren’t the lead dog, the view never changes; that kinda thing. Meanwhile, Hime was more about hiding behind that lead dog and jumping over him to the finish line when it counts, kind of thing.”
Mizushima managed to wrangle them well enough during school, but once they graduated the two of them were guaranteed to take different paths. And, indeed, the paths they took through MgRonald and Sentucky—two similar, but very different companies—couldn’t have looked less alike. With Kisaki, the conventional wisdom was that her care for each individual employee often led to clashes with management around her, slowing her career path despite her exceptional performance and popularity. Tanaka, on the other hand, didn’t focus as much on her staff, but she carried out her assigned work perfectly enough at each location to put up real results that landed that promotion.
They hadn’t told each other that, of course. That all went through Mizushima. If Mizushima and Kisaki met up, she’d talk all about it with Himeko, leaving out anything truly damaging. If she and Himeko met up, she’d talk all about that with Kisaki, keeping it safely in the realm of chitchat. It was a weird sort of love triangle, one Mizushima had been cultivating since their early years.
“So that’s why you knew about people working at Sentucky, Ms. Kisaki?”
Himeko Tanaka had probably talked about her assignment with Mizushima, and from Mizushima, it went right over to Kisaki. Thanks to that, Maou now knew about the discord between those two, and the reason why Kisaki acted out like she had.
“Really, nothing’s changed with our relationship, but after everything that’s piled up, when I saw her for the first time in a while, it just made my blood boil, and… Then you had to see that. I’m sorry.”
Kisaki bowed her head to Maou again.
“Oh, not at all…but why are you telling me all this? None of us thought you were attacking her at random. We just figured it was something kind of hard to talk about.”
“Well, to be honest, I didn’t think Yuki was gonna be this forthcoming with you, either. I just wanted to explain things to you and apologize, Marko, since you took the brunt of it. I’m planning to apologize to Chi and the rest along the same lines. I want to put this behind me.”
“You never stopped me, Kiki.” Mizushima plinked the ice around her otherwise-empty glass before bringing a hand to her chin. “But you’re right. Maybe I said too much. But I had a good reason why I figured it was okay for Maou to hear it.”
She flashed a conflicted grin, then looked at Maou, eyes squinting.
“It seems like Kiki really trusts you. That’s rare for her.”
“Trust?”
From Maou’s viewpoint, there wasn’t an employee on the team Kisaki didn’t trust. That didn’t seem to be what Mizushima meant.
“The only people who knew a
bout Kiki’s dreams until now were me and Hime. When she said she told you, that really surprised me.”
Her dream: to be the Italian ideal of a barista, an expert in every aspect of restaurant service. She wanted to test herself out, to see how far her skills could take her in Japan’s hospitality industry. She said so herself, to Maou and Chiho.
“…Well, it’s not because I think you alone are that special, Marko. We just had the opportunity to talk about it, that’s all.”
Kisaki was trying to defend herself, but it sounded needlessly evasive to Maou. She was hiding the real truth of it, and Mizushima felt it, too.
“Really?”
She looked up from the probing gaze she was giving Kisaki.
“But I’ve never heard you tell anyone besides us before now. Isn’t that right, Hime?”
““Huh?!””
Gasps of surprise leaped out of Maou’s and Kisaki’s mouth.
On the other side of the partition behind Maou’s back, a woman’s voice rang out.
“…You’re right. I haven’t, either.”
Nobody needed to ask who it was. Himeko Tanaka was even wearing the same pantsuit from this afternoon.
“Yuki… You tricked me!”
The fires of Kisaki’s rage burned anew.
“You yelled at me all high-and-mighty about apologizing to Marko, and you had Himeko listen in the whole time?!”
“I had to, or else you’d never agree to see her.”
“Well, yeah,” Himeko Tanaka said as she helped herself to the empty chair next to Maou. “If I was drinking face-to-face with Mayumi, I’d probably get sick to my stomach. I don’t like that sweet-potato shochu; that’s an old-people drink. Give me Kahlúa and milk any day.”
“Oh, you love that sweet stuff, huh? You have the taste buds of an eight-year-old.”
“As if I need someone who turns bright red after one beer telling me that.”
“That’s just my face, okay?! I don’t actually get drunk off it!”
“All right, enough, guys. You’re weirding out Maou. Let’s eat this stuff while it’s hot, all right?”
“Oh…uh, sorry.”
“Pfft.”
Kisaki and Himeko both glared at Maou, nailing him to his seat before he could make his escape. The table was now full of all the classic tasty, calorie-filled izakaya favorites, from teppanyaki meat to fried rice, and Mizushima briskly divided it up into portions for everyone.
The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 14 Page 12
